Video encoding using standards such as MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 offer many modes for achieving compression of the video data stream. Tradeoffs between computation time, complexity, and quality need to be considered in designing video encoding algorithms according to the standards. In addition to the many modes, video encoding also has the additional complexity of being able to encode different sized smaller units of a video frame. An efficient compression of a video frame will contain different encodings of different sized smaller units within a single video frame. To encode all of the different combination of modes and smaller units of a video frame requires substantial computation in order to find an efficient solution for encoding. It would be useful to be able to find an efficient solution without having to encode all combinations of modes and smaller units of a video frame.